Hi there. I'm not sure where to post this, or whether this is just me being picky, but I have query concerning word processors and the Mac. I used to have a Dell laptop and used OpenOffice on that to write most of my stuff. For the purposes of using the new BBC iPlayer, I switched on my old Dell and had to go through all the pain of Windows for it - bad show BBC - but looked through my old text files and realised that the old PC (it's a 4 year old Dell Latitude) was much better at just handling my text documents. I switched to a Mac a few months back and am impressed with all the stuff I can do with it - except simple word processing. Is it just me, or is NeoOffice really sluggish? Fonts seem to be a bit higgelty-piggelty when rendered on screen and take a wee while to zip around when scrolling. It kinda annoys me that my powerful Macbook isn't good enough for simple word processing. I downloaded the new version of Pages and noticed that wasn't exactly speedy (although fonts were rendered more accurately). I've used Bean, but this also seems to have a fonts problem. Does anyone else have the problems? Have I done something wrong with my Macbook installation?
Read the second paragraph. In my experience, NeoOffice is fairly sluggish. There are other free word processors out there, though.
If you're just doing text ... TextEdit is fast, TextMate is better. I use Textmate to write my documents, then Pages or LaTeX to pretty them up before printing.
OpenOffice 2.3 Aqua I downloaded the beta for OO Aqua and it seems to work a lot less sluggishly. However I can't really use this as it has all these warning about being unstable. TextEdit is actually the nippiest editor around, so I think I'll start using that. I didn't even think about it! But I still think it's a bit poor that there is no really solid, swift word processor for my Macbook. Is it the graphics cards that makes the rendering of fonts so slow?
Well, you could download OpenOffice for Mac, although having it run through X11 actually make things worse... If you are looking for text processing only, AbiWord might work for you. I tried it a long time ago, but the interface was somewhat messed up and it didn't do enough for what I was looking for. I'm not sure if they have fixed it, though. It's true that NeoOffice is a little sluggish, especially on the initial loading time. But being it's free and all, I guess I could live with it. -stndn.